Diary of a Sex Tourist
I had never thought of myself as a sex tourist.
When I decided to go down to the Dominican Republic, I was a photographer embarking on a project about prostitution.
The idea for the project crystallized after reading Denise Brennan’s book, What’s Love Got to Do With It?, an ethnography of sex workers in a small resort town on the DR’s north coast. The stories Brennan tells of the women who move to Sosúa to pursue sex work paint a picture not of passive victims of circumstance but of women pragmatically carrying out plans to improve their lives and the lives of their children. Brennan did not find the hapless victims one might expect. As it turned out, neither did I. Her book helped to dispel the prejudices and misgivings I had.
But as I packed for that first trip, I understood that in order to do the photo project I wanted to do, to enter and depict their world, I would likely need to become their client. I would become a sex tourist.
To be frank, I looked forward with some excitement to the prospect of having sex with Dominican prostitutes. It had been a while since I had sex by the time I flew down to the DR, a fact likely connected to my choice of photo project. My only prior experience with a prostitute was many years earlier, in Amsterdam. I recall that she, like most of the women I met in Sosúa, was from Santo Domingo.
With the first woman I met in Sosúa, I tried only to photograph. No sex. This was not a reflection of hesitation rooted in principle — I didn’t find her attractive. But she had a service to sell, and she sold and sold hard. I paid for sex and she allowed me to photograph her.
I soon discovered the brothel where I would spend much time over the next six months, getting to know the women who worked there. The first half of the series was approached more as portraiture than reportage and shows the women at work, inhabiting their professional personas, projecting the promise of sex.
Over time, the women spoke with me about their lives outside work, how they arrived in Sosúa, and their weekly routine of sending remittances home to support their children. As I got to know two of the women better, they gave me access to their everyday lives — their non-performance time — and I photographed them where they lived and out and about during their off-hours.
Whores and Madonnas contrasts quite a lot to other photo essays on prostitutes, which typically place the viewer as a voyeur to a degraded yet exotic existence, with depictions that harden rather than challenge prejudice and stigma. The women in Sosúa do not live the degraded lives of outcasts but, on the contrary, have a status that reflects their centrality in the local economy. Disarmingly ordinary, they elicit not pity but empathy and respect as they defy the false dichotomy that defines a woman as either madonna or whore.
Changing Relationships To Sex and to Photography
For many years, I was not interested in having a relationship with a woman, which largely explains the lack of sex prior to this project. In the course of my six months of going to Sosúa, I became enamored with the honest and direct transactional nature of the sex — something I was much better equipped to negotiate than sex connected with dating or dating connected with sex.
I came to really like one of the women I saw there regularly. She eventually became the woman I saw there exclusively. Instead of hanging out at the brothel, we started hanging out at her apartment. Then, when she left the brothel in order to go home and spend time with her daughter, we’d meet at hotels in Santo Domingo. When she went to St. Maarten on a work contract, I met her there. When she went to Curacao on another work contract, I met her there. In between visits, we chat every day on WhatsApp. This has been going on for nearly three years now.
I’ve become a regular of hers. There’s a high degree of fondness we have for each other. We are sexually very compatible and that remains at the center of things. The photo set Phoney Diana Diary was taken with my phone and is my diary of sorts of times visiting her.
Decriminalize Sex Work
I’m posting this now because Amnesty International is voting this week on a proposal to support the full decriminalization of sex work in order to advance the human rights of sex workers. This article provides a good overview.
Opponents of the Amnesty proposal typically portray sex workers as powerless victims and, of course, every story of victimization must have villains. Men who patronize sex workers are invariably portrayed as abusive and demeaning in order to fit that narrative. And I have no doubt that many are. But caricatures only get you so far in developing sound public policy. There is no single uniform experience for sex workers or a single uniform type of client. Public policy must do its best, in this case, to support the safety and well-being of sex workers. Amnesty talked with and listened to sex workers and the result is their policy proposal for full decriminalization.
During one of our weekends my friend and I were talking and she stopped me short. A flash of the eyes, then her penetrating stare. “You respect me.” A smart strong woman who takes care of her family — why wouldn’t I respect her?
All sex workers deserve respect. Ignoring what they say, treating them as victims when they aren’t, presuming they make no choices and have no goals is what is truly dehumanizing. Most are simply struggling to get by and support themselves and their loved ones, no different from you or me.
UPDATE: On 11 August 2015, at the International Council Meeting of Amnesty International in Dublin, Ireland, delegates voted to formally adopt a resolution authorizing the International Board to develop and execute a policy that supports the full decriminalization of all aspects of consensual sex work.
Here is a brilliant talk by English sex worker Toni Mac that explains why sex workers the world over demand full decriminalization.
